250 Years: Ken Burns; Jon Meacham; Edward Larson; AJ Jacobs

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. And on this Independence Day Eve, we put together a show in keeping with the holiday, the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, as if you didn't know, on July 4th, 1776
We'll hear from historians, Edward Larson and Jon Meacham, and from AJ Jacobs on his experiment with what he called living constitutionally.
But we begin with the legendary documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, and his longtime collaborator, Sarah Botstein, and their ambitious project, The American Revolution, pegged to the 250th anniversary year of the founding of the United States, July 4th, 1776, to July 4th, 2026, a quarter of a millennium. The war itself started in 1775, so we've actually passed that 250th anniversary, of course. The documentary series comprises six episodes on PBS.
Ken Burns joins us now, along with co-director Sarah Botstein, to talk about the series, and we'll listen to a few audio clips from Episode 1
They also wrote a piece for The Atlantic on the making of the series that's worth looking up. Sarah, welcome. Ken, welcome back to WNYC.

**Ken Burns** (1:27)
Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:29)
You didn't try to tell the story of the last 250 years, Ken, just of the period of the American Revolution. Why did you choose that as your frame for six episodes of two hours each?

**Ken Burns** (1:41)
Well, first of all, I take issue with your word, a peg in the introduction because we began this in December of 2015
Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency. Nobody was talking 250 We weren't thinking 250 We just realized after the Civil War, World War II in Vietnam, we had this big glaring hole in our resume.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:05)
Those films that you had done. It had to do with our founding story. Go ahead.
Just so people know, you were referencing films.

**Ken Burns** (2:14)
Yeah, films that we had done and it was daunting, of course, because there are no photographs or newsreels from this period, but we really felt strongly that we had to dive in and know about it. It was only halfway through that we began to realize, we might be done in 25, which means it's the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Conquered, and then all of a sudden people said, oh, you've planned it this way.
Suffice to say, I think the American Revolution, I believe Sarah agrees with me, is one of the most consequential events in all of world history, and that we know very little of it. It suffers from a glossed over sentimental view of it that is both bloodless and gallant, but short on the fact that this was a bloody revolution, superimposed over a bloody civil war and a big global war, the fourth global war for the Prize of North America. And just that alone and the sense that we normally think of it as just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, it needed to have, I thought, a deep dive into it, and that's what we've spent the last nearly 10 years doing.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:25)
So let me play for our listeners the very first words of the film, and listeners, see if you can guess whose words are being read here before they identify them at the end.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:38)
From a small spark kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished.
Without consuming, it winds its progress from nation to nation, and conquers by a silent operation. Man finds himself changed, and discovers that the strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it, and that in order to be free, it is sufficient that he wills it. Thomas Paine.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:13)
So Sarah, why did you open the docu-series with that?

**Sarah Botstein** (4:18)
Well, what a wonderful question. I think we wrestled, as we often do, with how to start the film and of course how to end the film. Who should have the first word and who should have the last? And it took us a while to figure out exactly what to put in that important position. And I think over the course of making the series, Thomas Paine's influence, his words, his writings became essential. We know that it's essential to the history, but we hadn't quite understood how essential. And Ken had the idea about halfway through editing that each episode would be taken from a Thomas Paine piece of writing. And I think we wanted everyone to sit down on November 16th and get a sense that we were going to take a big bite out of this apple. And for me, it's a beautiful quote that kind of casts forward how important the American Revolution is, as Ken was just saying, in terms of world history, but that something very new was going to happen here. And that quote sort of does that for me. And it took a while for us to order the first few elements of the show. And it was really one of the more fun things to figure out.